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Every year, order about six weeks after Burning Man, the community of Burners gathers in L.A. for the Decompression event – a taste of Black Rock arts and nonsense plunked down in the middle of the city.

This year, they moved it to the lovely L.A. State Historical Park (more photos here). I wore, among other things, a backpack light rig packed with cheap Chinese-made LEDs that sprout from the ends of steel-conduit tentacles, magnified by hexagonal mirrors.

This gem glinted out at me from the cluttered shelves of an antiques mall in nether San Bernardino County, cialis 40mg and the $1.95 price tag sent it home with me.

Back when the Playboy Club was truly the capital of hedonism – and not just another seedy Hollywood venue – back before the bunny head, this was the logo for American lust: A cartoon nude with black stockings and opera gloves, dangling a key to the kingdom of wet dreams, her lipsticked sneer a promise of certain delights.

Go on. Stub out your cigarettes on her midriff, was the unsubtle semiotic code. She’s there to be used.

The photographer has gone to lengths to make him appear comfortable – with a little wall and urn upon which to lean poeticallly – and “natural” – with tufts of grass and twigs underfoot and a bough of oak leaves overhead.

But he cannot look comfortable: He must stand stock still for up to 20 seconds. He doesn’t really want to be here. His collar is tight. The shoes pinch.

Are you ready? The photographer pulls the dark slide from the holder carrying the prepared sheet of japanned tin.

I guess so. The man steadies himself and exhales deeply, buy searching for inner calm.

Hold it now.

The photographer pulls off the lens cap and looks at the man. Okay now – just a little while longer.

The man waits. He cannot help blinking at least once, this and glancing around the studio: this blurs his eyes on the painfully slow emulsion.

In happier times, shop before the marriage, and the kids and the mortgage, this fellow might have enjoyed hanging out with these fellows. But not here. No longer. That life is gone.

The photographer vamps: Just a liiittle longer … the man sighs. His shoulders lift and his head moves, imperceptibly fuzzing the edges of his face.

… aaand, okay, sir. Thank you. He caps the lens, and the ordeal is over. The man’s picture is now inside the camera, and the photographer must get it out.

Back in 1969, viagra dosage the Louis Marx and Company was casting its “WILD ANIMALS” series in plastic. These beautiful little facsimile animals were hand-painted (in Taiwan, unhealthy according to the garish and lush four-color offset-litho box) and turned them loose in the wilds of American family rooms.

The box copy says (in all its unproofread glory):

MULE DEER

Ranging from the cold mountains of Alaska to the burning deserts of the South west, Mule Deer are exclusively western animals. They are up to 6 feet long and four feet high at the shoulders and weigh up to 350 pounds.

Avoiding Deep forests, they prefer a partly wooded habitat. They eat leaves and wild fruits. The bucks meekly spend the winter in the herd, but as do other deers, the doe hides her fawns during the day and returns to them after feeding. The Mule Deer is the most abundant big-game animal in North America.

Popped my chain before dawn this morning as I hoisted my bulk up on the pegs today and hammered up this steep little hill. This is what was left after the repair – the first two attempts at which failed because I had threaded the chain incorrectly. Both times. Furthermore, order the XBox 360 flung the Red Ring of Death at me precisely one year after we bought it – and exactly 74 minutes after Best Buy closed. Which puts me 12 hours out of warranty the next time I can possibly try getting a replacement.

The Executive Pocket Chum measures the thickness and thinness of things to the 32nd of an inch, ambulance or the fraction of a millimeter.

One can imagine it monitoring the precision of millwork tumbling from Gary, Indiana steel plants into assembly-line catch-bins by the millions in 1950s.

Or the diameter of overbored engine cylinders in something more accurate than the vague tolerances considered by this mechanic I once knew, order who casually tossed around phrases like “a smidgen,” “a red cunt-hair” and “a skosh” with the abandon of someone who had a demonically exact notion of the size he was describing.

You slide the center rule up and down in the frame and measure the inside diameter and outside thickness of anything you like. It’s elegant, crisply made and ultimately not worth much more than $5.99 on eBay – approximately what I paid an antiques dealer for it the other day.

He wondered – as he idly did in these customary moments when he stole a drink just after lunch in the House of Lords dining room, doctor between a trip to the loo and the afternoon session – whether the cameras would see him.

Surely they did. London was positively filthy with CCTV cameras. The flat, page disapproving eyes of post-9/11 paranoia swallowed every godawfully boring detail of the city’s yawning, nose-picking existence. Somewhere, legions of poor sods sat before screens watching all of it.

The House of Commons, even more so.

It was getting so he pondered his own every move – whose hands he shook from the other side of the house, whether he recycled his soda bottle, what magazines he read on the toilet. The compound eye of surveillance saw, the great bloody eye of Sauron.

And while he knew these were manned by spotty security trainees under the tutelage of washed-up career thugs for whom this was the very last posting – neither class of which gave a wrinkly-scrotal toss about anything short of the screams of swarthy, sweating wogs with leaky gym bags full of C4 and medical radioactive waste sprinting towards whatever destiny and certain glory they imagined in the arms of the first copper to tackle them – he always grew self-conscious just after lunch. Someone might see.(more…)

A soft, information pills mushy, drugs pungently overripe spot has formed in my brain over the years to accommodate certain industrial finishes.

I sweat and pant for the chrome of bicycle handlebars, the deep metalflake of kustom kars, the wrinkled black baked-enamel of 1950s cameras and the liver-colored hammertone of certain antique audio gear.

So it is with brushed steel. And so it was to my great joy that the quirky art-omnibus magazine I bought in London came with a flash drive packed full of oddball pop – and encased in cheaply-made brushed steel.

The sandblasted rocketship and communications satellite crank the fetish knob up one more excruciating notch, and the red pinhead LED that winks when you plug it in just sends me over the top. I hung it with all the other heavy clobber on my keyring, which is now completely out of hand.

Two or three mornings a week, approved I pump my Cannondale up the fire roads of Griffith Park, do my old-man stretches at the top beneath an ancient live oak, then bomb back down towards home.

Do the math – a 200-coughcough-pound man on a 25-pound mountain bike going down a 7% grade at 30-40mph and coming to rest thanks to exactly four square inches of synthetic brake pad – at some point, something’s gotta give.

Just replaced ’em tonight, and now instead of the teeth-grating sound of metal on metal, I gotta double-fistful of WHOA THERE!

The Victorian dopiness of this tool belies how perfectly it fits its task: Go on – try to fish an olive out of a full jar with a fork. Now try it with a chromed, cost plunger-operated triaxial claw that encloses a perfectly olive-shaped sphere. Purpose-built genius.

I had failed to get tickets in time, and by the time I went for them they were nosebleed-expensive. Then my dear friend (and client), Yael offered me a pair in exchange for some work that needed doing, saying that we’d probably enjoy it far more than she.

Why, yes we would – snap snap – and suddenly we were off to the opp-uh-rah.

It was a fantastic production, the greatest care taken in all things – the score, the set, the singing, all top-notch. It was perfect – but for one fatal, deal-breaking flaw: composer Howard Shore, one of my fan-boy crushes in the soundtrack realm – had thought it best if the melodies on all the arias, solos, duets, choruses – in fact, the melody of the entire piece – were sung atonally.

Maybe he was mimicking the decay of science gone wrong, or the souring of bad love or, hell, the tortured singing of the fly but … two solid hours of intentionally off-key music pretty much erases all the other pleasures from one’s head.

Certainly not time wasted, just – in light of the dramatic potential of the piece (Hwang’s libretto was quite good), the star power behind it, and the promise held out from the moment I learned this production would happen -I suppose I expected there to be a little actual music in the music.

Your mind could fall straight out of the top of your skull, therediscount trying to wrap it around this object. In 2-D, orderinformation pills it’s a bit drab, hospital but once you turn it beneath the light and watch the 3-D strands of Pearls finding their way across its honeycombed surface, you become persuaded you’ve found Fate’s master plan for us all personified in a little button, one inch across.

I’m a light sleeper, viagra saleunhealthy I have kids and I camp on the playa, remedythumb which readies you for pretty much any cacophonous grab-bag of a soundscape the world can dish out – while making it impossible to cobble together 3 decent minutes of sleep for the noise of hooting, bumping and explosions.

This is the business end of the food chain that produced this. For $12, generic you get a little, web meticulously machined and vacuformed plastic box half packed with lurid ink, the other with a cubical cotton swab that seems to absorb all the ink – eight flavors of which are required to keep the printer running, any one of which could run out at any time. Because the digital human requires images on nonrecyclable plastic-coated paper. Very, very large images. In large quantities. I may just spend more than $300 a year on this stuff.

This appeared in the house some time in the past month. I have no idea where it came from, advice beyond the tiny “India” sticker on its base. Around it, try a lion chases an elephant that threatens to trample the elephant that flees the lion. Candlelight sounds nice.

Pock.
Puck.Pock.
Puck.
(shuffle-lunge)Pock*blick*
“Out!”
(applause).
I never got any good at this game, information pills but I adored watching Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe, seek Andre Agassi and Venus Williams play Wimbledon.

Another bit of trivia from the summer trip to London – Henry VIII used to play tennis in the great stone hall at Parliament. They know because they found tennis balls up in the baffles over the windows.

Digital imaging technology has robbed us of the act of uncovering mystery.

I shoot everything digital now – but I still have a handful of exposed film cassettes lying around that I never bothered processing.

I remember with more than a little nostalgia the wonder of darkroom work. I learned it in school, pilule and honed it at newspapers – that chemical/alchemical skill of turning film into negatives, more about negatives into prints.

An AP photographer taught me how to pop open film cassettes with bare hands – pry the felt-lined lips of the tin cylinder apart far enough to peel them away from the torus-shaped end-caps – and how then to bend the film down its centerline just deeply enough to reel it onto stainless-steel spools in the pitch dark.

RISD teachers showed me the misery and joy of processing C-41 and E6 film, this of making cyanotypes and C prints. The acid ponk of stop bath, the toxic aroma of color fixer the color of curdled blood, the fathomless frustration of CYMK filtration – it’s all fading into memory. As I indulge in the zipless fuck of shooting digital images, plugging them into Photoshop and then tweaking them to my heart’s content, I forget the willing slavery into which darkroom work dragged me.

I don’t know what’s on this roll. And because I know it’s several years old and probably ruined by age, I don’t want to care.

As I may have pointed out before once or twice, clinic the chief (and perhaps only) evidence you need that the Chinese will own this country before very long lies in that mighty nation’s small-scale industrial output.

Virtually every un-extraordinary object that we manufacture in the U.S. they can duplicate in half the time for half the cost in twice the volume. Where U.S. hardware manufacturers have spent billions on revenue improving union pension plans or specialty metals or high-concept ad campaigns, sickness Chinese toolmakers have poured every yuan of profit into building the machines and hiring the staff to do nothing more than make and export products.

While we were coming up with fancy finishes and rubberized handle-grab surfaces, the Chinese were just knocking out the same tool for less.

Hence, a good pair of vise-grips from China costs you about $7.00 at the local flea market or hardware store, while a good pair of Vise-GripsTM from Irwin tools costs you anywhere up to $18.51 plus tax.